I am all for exploring new double bill pairings, since there are many great one-act operas that don’t see the light of day often enough. So I was looking forward to the combination of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges in the season opening production at the New National Theatre, Tokyo, and what it could illuminate about the theme of mother and child that runs through both operas.
It was originally NNTT’s artistic director Kazushi Ono’s idea to stage a series of double bills pairing each of Puccini’s Trittico with another composer’s one-act opera. The project started in 2019 with Gianni Schicchi and Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy. This current production is the second instalment, by the same creative team of director Jun Aguni and conductor Ryusuke Numajiri.
The double bill opened with Suor Angelica. Sent to the convent for having an illegitimate child, Angelica hasn’t heard from her family for seven years. One day her aunt, the Princess visits, and informs her that the child died two years ago. So in this opera, the child exists only in Angelica’s memory.
The picturesque set, designed by Atsumi Yokota, is largely faithful to Puccini’s original setting of a secluded Italian convent of the 17th century, and manages to create the serenity of the cloistered sanctuary with minimum means. The scenes with the nuns are played out against the backdrop of greyish stone walls, arches and stairs on three tiers, complete with the herb garden that Angelica tends. The lower tier is a moving platform that leads to other sections of the building, such as the room where Angelica’s confrontation with her aunt takes place, with a painting of an ominous cross hovering above.
What struck me most in this production was that by freeing Puccini’s Suor Angelica from the Trittico context, it gives an opportunity to really savour its music and in particular Puccini’s sparse but effective writing for the orchestra. When it is not preceded by the gritty verismo drama of Il tabarro, one can watch the opera with emotional freshness and marvel at the subtle expressions of Puccini’s writing on its own terms.
Soprano Chiara Isotton showed dramatic vocal presence as Angelica in an otherwise rather uniform Japanese cast. Starting out as one of the nuns, she gradually reveals her hidden emotions. In the scene with her aunt, sung by French-based Japanese mezzo-soprano Junko Saito, there was a palpable tension between them, and her despair on learning her son’s death was truly heartbreaking. Saito’s Princess was appropriately severe and merciless, but rather than being a cardboard cut-out figure, she seemed to show vulnerability too. The singing was eloquently supported from the pit by Numajiri, who paced the music with care, building up to a strong emotional climax in the final scene where Angelica takes her own life to join her son. The stage direction in this scene indicates that a miracle happens and the vision of her child appears before her. But Aguni decided to keep this to her imagination, so we are left to make our own conclusions about her fate.
In contrast, Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Spells) unfolds from the child’s perspective, and the mother (Junko Saito again) is a symbolic presence rather than a real figure – in fact, in this production she is only represented by a silhouette. The child, scolded by his mother, takes his anger out on his toys and objects, when the room suddenly becomes alive and starts a revolt.
The visuals inform us that we are in a French town house. Contrasting with the plain-coloured set of Angelica, here everything is colourful and vivid, especially the moonlit garden in shimmering turquoise and green. Chloé Briot played the naughty child (though more reluctant than outrightly naughty), while the rest of the cast was taken by Japanese singers, many of them NNTT regulars. In particular Teppei Kono’s Grandfather Clock, Rie Miyake’s Princess, and Yuki Sugiura’s Squirrel stood out. Six dancers added visual flamboyance by playing the roles of the cats, the fire and frogs; however, the off-stage singing of these roles felt a bit distant. Each character was vividly depicted visually with charming costumes and effective lighting, but the singing wasn’t able to cast a magic spell. In the pit too, the orchestra didn’t quite capture the spirit of Ravel’s playful, jazzy score.
A game of two halves then, but my overall disappointment was that Aguni chose to present the two as independent works and didn’t actively link them, even implicitly. True, their stories are set centuries apart, in different languages and styles, but for a more holistic experience, I couldn’t help wishing he had made a stronger case for staging them together.
